Nick Melvoin is proud to serve the dynamic communities of District 4 on the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education. Nick’s election to the Board in May of 2017 follows a career fighting for our city’s schoolchildren. He believes that together, with the right leadership, we can ensure that every student in Los Angeles has the opportunity to succeed. Born and raised on the Westside of LA, Nick served as a seventh and eighth grade English teacher at Markham Middle School, an LAUSD campus in Watts, where he coached soccer and baseball and helped his students launch a school newspaper. At Markham, he saw firsthand how poor governance neglected the needs of our city’s most vulnerable students. When he and two-thirds of Markham’s teachers lost their jobs due to budget cuts, he fought to be re-hired and worked to end the indiscriminate, seniority-based teacher layoffs that harm so many LA families. As a teacher, Nick joined the ACLU, Mayors Riordan and Villaraigosa, and others to bring a ground-breaking civil rights lawsuit which argued that LA’s layoffs violated the rights of students.

Nick holds a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, a Masters in Urban Education from Loyola Marymount University (LMU), and a law degree from the New York University School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Service Scholar. In addition to serving as a teacher, Nick has worked in the Obama White House with the Domestic Policy Council and the US Attorney’s office where he took part in various civil rights investigations as a legal clerk. Prior to his election, Nick led and facilitated efforts by students, parents, teachers, and community members to rethink and shape the future of our city’s schools. He also served as an adjunct professor at LMU where he taught a course on Education Law. In working for nonprofits such as Teach Plus and Educators 4 Excellence, Nick helped to improve the support teachers across the state receive before and during their time in the classroom, as well as amplify teacher voice in policy-making. Nick has recently served on the boards of the Los Angeles County Young Democrats, Brentwood Community Council, Teach For America Associates, University Synagogue's Social Justice Committee, and United in Harmony. He is a graduate of the Jewish Federation’s New Leaders Project and the New Leaders Council and has chaired the Jewish Federation’s Educators’ Network. Nick is also proud to serve as a director of Camp Harmony, a camp for homeless and underserved children. His commitment to solving educational inequity was first sparked as a volunteer at Camp Harmony more than sixteen years ago.